4 Answers
4

You DON'T need interface aliases in order to have multiple IP addresses for the same server. You should use interface aliases mostly if you are dealing with separate subnets and need to route between the addresses, which doesn't seem to be the case.

With Linux (since 2.2 or 2.4, I don't remember) a single interface may have many addresses. This is the preferred way of setting it up. There are issues with the multiple aliases setup, for example, it is not clear how a broadcast message should be handled if multiple aliases are on the same subnet.

I don't know how you set this in Gentoo configuration, but using the standard ip interface, it is simple:

Note 1: Broadcasts will be received only by the first address. If your addresses are on different subnets, you may want to set broadcasts on the other IPs also.

Note 2:ifconfig won't probably show the additional addresses, it is obsolete anyways. Use ip addr show to check which addresses are assigned to each network interface.

Anyways, answering your question: no. Each alias is viewed as a different interface for the system. So eth0 would be one interface, with one address, eth0:0 would be another interface with another address and so on.

Each must be unique. The number after the colon is arbitrary and the numbers need not be sequential. In fact, they don't even have to be numbers at all. From Documentation/networking/alias.txt in the Linux source:

An alias is formed by adding a colon and a string when running ifconfig. This string is usually numeric, but this is not a must.

I agree with Juliano. In Gentoo, you can configure this with /etc/conf.d/net and then set config_eth0 with multiple space seperated ips. The line should look like this:
config_eth0=( "192.168.0.1/24" "192.168.0.2/24" "192.168.0.3/24" )